


Orange Fury

by Rhinozilla



Category: Jak and Daxter
Genre: Daxter uses all the guns, Daxter versus metalheads, Gen, Mild Language, and sand, jak is not a good driver, post jak 3
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-08
Updated: 2018-12-08
Packaged: 2019-09-14 11:29:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,361
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16912068
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rhinozilla/pseuds/Rhinozilla
Summary: Jak and Daxter are stranded with a busted Sand Shark in the wastelands when a storm rolls in, bringing metalheads with it. Jak is out cold, and Daxter has to figure out how to keep them both alive until help comes.





	Orange Fury

Red ammo, fully loaded. Yellow ammo, about half capacity. Blue ammo, completely out. Purple ammo, not enough rounds. Dammit, why did they never have enough of it?

Daxter tossed the useless blue gun mod into the back of the Sand Shark, where it quickly sank into the growing pool of sand swarming the car. He wasn’t as quick as Jak was at swapping out the mods on the morph gun, and the roar of the sandstorm whipping around them did NOTHING to help him there. He cursed and jammed on the yellow mod. He crawled up out of the cockpit of the shark and onto the top of the dashboard, hefting the gun up onto his shoulder and casting the red bead of the blaster around their perimeter.

Jak was motionless in the driver’s seat, slouched sideways and half hanging out of the car. The only thing keeping him from falling out into the sand was his arm, caught around one of the roll bars. How that arm hadn’t been snapped clean off in the crash, Daxter didn’t want to think on it too hard. The important thing was that they were both still breathing, and…and that was the only good news that he could think of at the moment.

Sand burned Daxter’s eyes and nose, and he yanked his goggles down to cover his eyes. He got a hold of the red scrap of material hanging off Jak’s shoulder and yanked it. The cloth tore where it was caught under his friend’s shoulder guard. Daxter made quick work of wrapping the material around the lower half of his face, shielding his nose and mouth from the onslaught of sand. Pausing just a second, he repeated the process with Jak’s red scarf, covering the lower part of Jak’s face and less than gently shoving his goggles over his eyes. It wouldn’t do to survive this only to have your whole face blasted off by the most intense exfoliation ever.

Through the sizzle of sand blowing around, Daxter’s ears picked up the hair-raising scuttle of incoming metalhead stingers. Of course, of frickin’ course they crashed into a stinger nest.

“Jak, buddy, if we survive this, we gotta have a talk about defensive driving.” He squinted one eye as he looked down the barrel of the blaster.

The red bead locked onto the nearest stinger, and he pulled the trigger. The slug punched across the air, finding its target. The recoil on the blaster wasn’t too bad, but Daxter spread his feet wider on the dashboard of the car and lowered his center of gravity for better balance. The bead found a new target, and Daxter fired. Another stinger screeched into silence, and the sand swallowed the corpse.

Okay, priority one, take out all these nasties that had come crawling out of the nest.

Priority two, find Jak’s beacon and turn it on so that Spargus could find them.

Priority three, not get buried and/or suffocated by the sand that was already halfway up the shark’s tires.

Daxter continued to let the blaster autolock on the stingers. They were coming in droves. There were more and more of them, coming too fast, until Daxter cursed again when the yellow mod jammed. He jumped down into the passenger seat and sank to his ankles in sand.

“Shit,” he hissed, disengaging the yellow mod and grabbing up the red one, slapping it on there and loading the Plasmite RPG.

The stingers swarmed closer. One of them even lashed forward, and its clawed tail embedded in the metal of the car’s engine less than two feet away from Daxter’s foot.

Daxter yelped and tugged on the trigger. The small grenade launched forward, dribbling over the roll bars and plopping into the sand. Daxter hit the deck, ducking under the dashboard just as the explosion went off.

The sand was momentarily parted by the percussive blast wave, enough for Daxter to see bits of metalhead and a mist of dark eco where the mass of stingers had been wasted. There wasn’t more than a second to breathe in relief, though, as that gap was quickly swallowed up again by sand and more scuttling beasts.

Daxter sat up and planted one foot on the steering wheel and the other on Jak’s shoulder. He pushed his heel against Jak, trying to jostle him.

“C’mon…c’mon…Now is not nap time, big guy!”

He released another RPG, achieving the same results as before. He couldn’t keep this up; the ammo was burning up too quickly. Sand had filled the floorboards and was starting to eat at the seats. It had already swallowed Jak’s entire lower half, though he didn’t appear to mind. More concerning was the shiny, ugly red that had become the bare flesh on Jak’s arms. The sand was going to skin them both alive.

Daxter blew into the yellow mod to clear the sand that was jamming the mechanism. He popped off the red mod and snapped the yellow back on, this time launching the Gyro Burster. The drone disc popped free, zipping up into the air. For one haunting moment, Daxter worried that the wind would steal the thing away, but it anchored itself overhead, unleashing a shower of yellow blasts into all targets that were creeping in on their position.

Gods, Daxter loved Tess for this baby.

At the brief reprieve that the assault bought them, Daxter dropped into where Jak’s lap had been, since the sand was midway up his chest by now. Daxter ducked his shoulder into his friend’s chest, pushing as hard as he could to try and get Jak back upright in the seat. Gravity and the angle of the car worked against him, but he had pure adrenaline and panic in his veins. After a few shoves, he managed to break the inertia, pinning Jak against the back of the seat.

Jak’s head lolled back, revealing the nasty scrape at his hairline—probably why he was out cold now. Daxter gave him a violent shake, with no result. He couldn’t even properly take a pulse in this mayhem. The only indication that he had that Jak wasn’t…that he was still alive was the way that the dark eco from the fallen stingers gravitated toward him.

“Sorry, pal,” Daxter wheezed shortly.

The drone lowered and snapped back into its housing unit on the morph gun.

No more metalheads loomed through the whipping curtains of sand, and the respite let Daxter’s attention wander to the fact that his own fur and skin was being clawed at by the wind and everything that it carried with it.

He dropped in front of the steering wheel and squinted at the dashboard. The shark was completely dead. Even if it wasn’t, it wouldn’t have the juice to dislodge itself from being over halfway buried. The sand had started to creep up across the engine.

They were toast. Dammit, after all this, after all the Hell that they’d been through, they were gonna die out here because of Jak’s bad driving and a few metalheads? Unacceptable.

The beacon.

Like a firecracker, the forgotten beacon zapped across Daxter’s thoughts again. He dropped the gun on the dashboard and immediately started digging at the sand over Jak’s hip, searching for the utility bag where he kept the beacon.

His fingers sifted only through sand, sand, and more damned sand until he nearly split his fingers open on the unexpected metal edge of the beacon. With a cry of triumph, Daxter lurched backwards out of the hole that he had created. He punched the button activating the beacon, rewarded with the flashing red on the front of it.

…Now what? They just wait?

They couldn’t just sit here and wait. The sand was already to Jak’s armpits. He wasn’t waking up, and Daxter couldn’t move him by himself.

“What do I do, Jak?” he mumbled, voice stolen by the wind and the red cloth around his mouth.

The weight of the beacon in his hands suddenly wasn’t so comforting.

The rig around them shuddered. Some of the sand rippled with the movement. Daxter paused, lifting his eyes from the beacon. Another shudder, and more shifting sand.

An image of the massive wasteland metalheads, lumbering like small mountains across the desert rose unbidden to his thoughts, and he pushed it away.

Dammit, why couldn’t they catch a break?”

Daxter shoved the beacon into his pocket, grabbing up the gun again. He scrambled up onto the top of the driver’s seat back rest. He didn’t want to risk his usual spot on Jak’s shoulder, didn’t want to contribute to anything that would make Jak sink faster. At least the sand was pushing on Jak’s chest, keeping him pinned upright and not letting him fall face forward to drown in dirt.

It was a barely measurable positive.

The heavy impact from massive metalhead footsteps was getting closer. The strength in Daxter’s arms was wavering after wielding the morph gun so much. The red mod had been swallowed by the sand, and there were only a few clicks of yellow ammo left…He might as well throw rocks at the monster that was heading their way.

The purple mod, which Daxter had mostly ignored, was still setting on the dashboard, unused.

Well, if there was ever a time for it…

Daxter disengaged the yellow mod and snatched up the purple, sliding it in place and switching it over to the Super Nova. The mini nuke glowed faintly like dark eco, and Daxter smirked. He reached out and patted Jak on the head.

“If this is it, then let it never be said that the demolition duo did not go down without the ULTIMATE bang.”

Maybe it was the desperation of his imagination, but he thought Jak might have moved his head a bit at that. His head was just about all that was above the sand at this point. Daxter felt a weight in his chest but puffed himself up, propping the gun up against the head rest of the seat. Aiming the small nuke wasn’t so much a priority with this thing. So long as you pulled the trigger, everything around you was gonna get really dead, really fast.

Well…might as well wait for it to get closer…maybe even get a good look at its big, stupid face when it saw them and realized that it was completely fu—

“Cherries!”

 Daxter may have actually screamed when he heard Sig’s voice boom across the storm.

The familiar crackle of the Peace Maker’s energy burst snaked through the sand. It made impact with the flank of the nearest metalhead. The beast roared and toppled sideways. The residual light from the explosion illuminated three more hulking forms closing in on the buried Sand Shark and the incoming Slam Dozer.

Sig in the Dozer was zooming toward them, sliding through the gap that was left behind by the unbalanced metalhead. Its buddies were already getting their wits about them to attack.

Moving too fast for his thoughts to catch up with his body, Daxter haphazardly lifted the Super Nova and launched it.

The purple warhead erupted out of the gun, painting a purple streak in the air above the Slam Dozer. It bypassed the first metalhead before colliding with the next one in line. The Slam Dozer piled over the accumulated sand, coming to a stop with its massive tires high enough to rest on the engine of the shark.

The nuke went off.

Daxter’s hearing fell to white noise as the first percussive wave reached them, rippling away from the epicenter where the four metalheads were…er…had been. Meat, metal, and bone ricocheted around the cars as the monsters were disintegrated. The shock wave silenced the sand and the wind, generating a naked balloon of air around them.

“Holy shit, Daxter!” Sig yelled, leaping out of the Dozer. “You better pray that we are outside the fallout radius of that shit, or I swear…”

“Kill me later, Sig!” Daxter was stretched too thin to try and schmooze his way out of this one. “Jak. Get Jak!”

Much as he could tell that Sig wanted to rip his head off some more, the King of Spargus instead went into Wastelander mode. He threw a sheet of metal out of the Dozer, creating a catwalk of sorts from the Dozer to what was left of the shark. He climbed onto it and shimmied to them.

All of the displaced wind started to slam backwards toward the mushroom cloud in a vacuum. Daxter grabbed onto the roll bars of the shark to keep from being sucked in. Sig had tossed his Peace Maker into the Dozer, and he knelt down, getting his hands under Jak’s armpits and heaving him up with an ease that reminded Daxter how small he himself was.

Sig dredged Jak up out of the sand and onto the metal sheet. Jak was starting to twitch and shift on his own, but his movements looked more like spasms than intentional action. Sig didn’t give him a chance, hauling him up and into the Dozer’s passenger seat, where he landed gracelessly but safely.

Daxter scurried across the sheet, the gun locked in his hands by white knuckles and blind adrenaline. He made it into the Dozer’s passenger floorboard, bouncing between Jak’s boots and coughing on sand and his own throat. Sig’s weight landing in the driver’s seat made the Dozer shift a bit, and then the engine was roaring.

The momentum of the car lurching forward sent Daxter into the front of the seat.

“Hold on, chili pepper.” Sig took the Slam Dozer away from the site, tossing Jak’s beacon into the mostly buried cockpit of the shark, to be dredged up later and retrieved. “There’s a cave up ahead where we can hunker in until this passes. We’re too far out to make it back to Spargus in this.”

“Whatever you say, big guy,” Daxter wheezed, holding onto Jak’s leg to keep from being whipped out of the floorboards from the wind and Sig’s aggressive driving. “Whatever you say!”


End file.
